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Got thinking more about that & it makes sense; they're infinite & in the case of the ceilings basically just an ambient fill but w/ a direction which I guess is sort of an oxymoron.

I was wondering how you address a situation like this where you've a mixture of overhead Flush mounts & beamed ceilings? Also, do you clone & flip your ceiling lights in order to light the ceiling itself or another approach?

I basically do what you are doing - but be careful you don't want the light get to close to those beams, you'll see a demarcation line on the beam where the light hits it. In your case you may want to narrow those lights somewhat. As far as light hitting the ceiling I either count on GI or I'll actually put lights close to the floor facing up. I'll exclude all objects except the room and gently fill the ceiling. Good luck. Nice model BTW.

I basically do what you are doing - but be careful you don't want the light get to close to those beams, you'll see a demarcation line on the beam where the light hits it. In your case you may want to narrow those lights somewhat. As far as light hitting the ceiling I either count on GI or I'll actually put lights close to the floor facing up. I'll exclude all objects except the room and gently fill the ceiling. Good luck. Nice model BTW.

OK, that's sort of what I was thinking, particularly in using the exclude option.

I'm trying to get away from GI. Probably gonna have to restart on the lighting though & to a bit more geometry fiddles to isolate things.

Actually, this was a model I picked up from Daz. Cost a whopping $15 so kinda hard to resist. It's just hyper, anally modeled though. I mean, why would you model CFL pigtail globes that are in an overhead fixture that you'd never be able to tell what the were in the first place? And there are a dozen or so. Sconces too for another couple dozen. But, I appreciate having the option.

Even so, I had to run it through PolyTrans first as Modeler just couldn't handle the exported OBJ. Something like a paltry 8.5+ Gb of polys. Meh. Did some initial breaking up of things, but need to do more with the foliage I think.

Unfortunately, all that's going to get put on hold for a bit. I have to go back to Tinselburg for a few months; leave Sunday. I've got LW on the laptop mostly for some modeling projects, but it has nowhere near the horsepower of the main system to do serious rendering.

Of course it renders black... the cast shadow option makes the light behave like an object which itself casts a shadow from other lights... by turning it on in your scene, you're basically just turning it into a polygon blocking the distant light.

Yeah, this... the cast shadows option causes the actual light to be a complete light 'blocker'. So, another light behind it will cause shadows to be cast by the light geo. Never used it, but I'm sure it would be handy for some things.

Yeah, this... the cast shadows option causes the actual light to be a complete light 'blocker'. So, another light behind it will cause shadows to be cast by the light geo. Never used it, but I'm sure it would be handy for some things.

Then why the ph.... don't put the info in the Wiki???

And it's not just Newtek. There seems to be a universal arrogance in all software these days that programmers refuse to document there work. Why is that?

I had to tear one developer on Daz a new one when he replied that an error with his should be obvious. No it wasn't. Otherwise why dozens of people asking the SAME question, & that one user spent hours trying to figure out what was going on & ended up posting a video to decypher what the arrogant A**hole did.

I think I finally drove my point home when I stated, that if he'd simply taken probably all of 30 seconds & WRITE a simple, brief description of his products function, not only would all the end users have NOT wasted all of their time, he would NOT have to repeatedly be addressing the same issues over and over and saving HIM lots of time & aggravation.

It gets back to the old adage, if you can't explaining it to a 6 year old kid, you have failed.

RH explains this one in his training too, if there are any lingering questions.

Trying to find an answer to a a specific question shouldn't require re-watching 20 mins of video (& hope you've the right one) to find what your looking for though. I've mentioned before that I wish RH's vids had some sort of synopsis or index.

Ma3rk did you ever come to a conclusion that the issue you were having is a bug in the software or user misunderstanding?

Hey Tim,

I'm going with OpError due to lack of complete, detailed notes with Portal Lights. When I get back I'll do some more tests to isolate the issue (suspect some setting with whatever's being used for the light), but as pointed out, turning on Shadow option for the light changes the nature of the light. It's simply not documented.